Hi everyone, It's my pleasure to announce the following sites as the winners of the USA round of the World Summit Awards competition (http://www.wsis-award.org). These sites will now be up for consideration in the worldwide competition, which will be decided this autumn prior to the World Summit on the Information Society.
E-Culture: Lakota Winter Counts / Lakota Waniyetu Wowapi (http://wintercounts.si.edu) Lakota Winter Counts is an online exhibit created by the Smithsonian Museum's National Anthropological Archives. The exhibit effectively uses multimedia as a way to teach users about the history of the Lakota Indian tribe and their use of "Winter Counts," a picture-based language employed to record important events over the course of many years. Lakota Indians have a long tradition of oral history, which they supplemented successfully with the use of these Winter Counts. The online exhibit is a fascinating, moving tribute to Lakota culture. The site also balances robust multimedia content with an accessible version of the website for people with disabilities or limited Internet bandwidth. E-Entertainment: Fin, Fur and Feather Bureau of Investigation (http://www.fffbi.com/) The Fin, Fur and Feather Bureau of Investigation (FFFBI) uses humor and storytelling to help kids ages 8-13 learn about places and cultures around the world. Using multimedia stories, online radio and interactive games, FFFBI encourages kids to act as "agents" and investigate a series of mysteries that take them virtually around the world. The website is a production of WGBH Interactive. E-Government: GovTrack (http://www.govtrack.us/) GovTrack is an extraordinary tool that seeks to lessen the divide between US residents and their policymakers. The website allows users to track legislation online, including the legislation itself, news and speeches about it, and blog discussions by everyday Americans debating the legislation. It's one of the most creative uses of a technology known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, which makes it easier for Internet users to customize content that's interesting to them. The site was created by graduate student Joshua Tauberer, which is quite extraordinary in that is surpasses the usefulness of many government-developed e-government websites. E-Health: Medline Plus (http://medlineplus.gov/) Medline Plus, a service of the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, contains a vast collection of information about diseases, research, medicines and other topics vital for people interested in their health. Visitors can access interactive health tutorials, connect with clinical trials experimenting with cutting-edge medicine, even view videos of surgical procedures. E-Inclusion: Ourmedia (http://www.ourmedia.org) OurMedia.org is one of the most important recent developments in the world of citizen's media. This website allows anyone with Internet access to produce and publish their own content, including text, images, audio and video. In the last year, thousands of Internet users have begun to produce their own audio blogs, or podcasts, as well as video blogs. For many people, though, the cost of storing this content online prevented them from becoming actively involved as content producers. OurMedia has changed all that. Now, anyone with their own content can publish it for free using OurMedia, and participate in a vibrant online community of citizen's media activists. OurMedia is a powerful tool for bridging the content divide, inviting all Internet users to become content producers in their own right. E-Learning: International Schools CyberFair (http://www.globalschoolnet.org/gsh/cf) The International Schools CyberFair is one of the leading student website competitions in the world. Coordinated by the Global SchoolNet Foundation, CyberFair gives youth the opportunity to create educational content about their communities as a way of demonstrating their website design skills. Kids from all over the world have contributed content to the website, a massive database of educational websites, all developed by youth. The CyberFair is testimony to the ability of young people to be developers of compelling, diverse and socially relevant content. E-Science: National Center for Biotechnology Information (http://www.ncbi.nih.gov) The NCBI website is a veritable goldmine of scientific information related to genetics. The site contains an amazing array of resources related to DNA, including the entire sequence of the human genome. The site is a vital tool for geneticists as well as for laypeople interested in understanding the basic building blocks of life. For the category of e-business, our team of judges decided not to submit a nomination. We were disappointed with the overall quality of the sites up for consideration in this category, as well as their lack of accessibility for people with disabilities and other factors vital to achieving an inclusive information society. We hope that in the future, more e-businesses will submit their sites for consideration. -- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
